Whoops

It's three in the morning. What the hell am I doing? I was up late, yeah, 'til one, but then I went to bed. I took a two hour nap, and then woke up ~10 minutes ago, very much awake. I guess taking a four hour nap to get rid of a migraine was not the best way to tell my body that it should sleep normally tonight. It's not like I have a lot to do tomorrow, either.

Way to blow it, body. Excellent job screwing things up, body. I'm gonna have to write a few emails to pass some time, and then try again, body. Thanks.

Crammed

I remain out of touch with the people I'd really like to stay in touch with. Writing just seems to take a lot of energy that I simply don't have these days.

I left work early today feeling crappy, and turns out it's a migraine. On the plus side, this explains my wooziness, general stupidity, and intense moodiness this weekend. I'm no longer concerned about that. Now it's chiefly a matter of making the pain in my head go away. :-p

Portland sounds so good right now.

1. I feel very creative.
2. I feel like returning to Portland.
3. Both of these might be because of the rum.

Play a word game, donate rice!

This site apparently donates ten grains of rice to the UN for every word you can correctly define. It's fun, and an easy way to make a small (but noticeable!) impact. http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Sleeping in

I've forgotten how to sleep in. Staying up late and waking up early are my norms now. Even if I'm up until 2 or 3 in the morning on a weekend night, my body is programmed to wake up not later than 8:30 at the very latest. It's funny how a couple of panicked mornings can set such a tough rule to override.

I spent my Saturday running a quick errand or two, watching a movie, and napping for a couple of hours. Then I went to a night market in the evening and learned that my ass is too big for Taiwanese fashion to handle. My pants size here is XXL or XXXL, depending on the cut. That said, I did wind up finding some awesome, cheap clothing that does fit. Pride: damaged. Bank account: intact. Two pair of shorts for 100 NT each (about 3 USD) is something to be happy about.

Weekends have changed from "Go out exploring!" times to "Recover from the work week!" times.

Exciting news for the coming week: I'm going on a field trip with the school to a theme park, and at one point I will be paid to spend 45 minutes doing bumper cars with the little rugrats. I will bring my camera. Superb.

Spotted in Taipei

Spotted on a waitress at a bar near my apartment. She speaks little English, and insists that it's "just a t-shirt", and that she has no idea where Reed is. I am amused. I apologize for the quality, it's a cell phone pic.

Why my job is a sitcom

Bear with me here, because this is going to be a long post. I'm going to run through what I do at work, and why my job is a tragically hilarious joke. I think it's pretty funny/interesting, but y'all may find it boring. If that's the case here are two ways to skip the boring stuff: first, all the dirt is down at the bottom. Second, I'll repost the link to the pictures of the little kids. Look: little kids! Aren't they cute?!

Still reading? Wonderful! So here's what a day looks like for me: wake up at 6:45 and hit the snooze. Wake up again at 6:53 and actually get out of bed. Check my email for about 20 minutes while Martin (my housemate) showers, etc. From about 7:15 to 7:45 I do my morning routine. Around 7:45 I make breakfast (PB and J!), grab my stuff, and eat on my way to work.

The walk to work is about 20 minutes through a commercial/residential area (apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor). Arrive at work no later than 8:30 on a day where I miss my alarm. I prep for class for half an hour (photocopies, going over teaching materials, getting last-minute details worked out, and so on), and then I do half an hour of aerobics with the kids to wake them (and me) up.  After a snack, we launch into the first lesson.

After an hour of phonics and reading there's a fifteen minute break, and then 40 minutes of either math or phonics and grammar, depending on the day. Then they read alone for 20 minutes to practice good reading habits. This is one of my favorite parts of the day, because I get to read my novel so that I can "demonstrate good reading habits." In the month and change I've been teaching I've made it through maybe 120 pages. I typically read up to 100 pages an hour, if it's an engaging book. 

After DEAR time (Drop Everything And Read), the kids have 20 minutes to eat lunch (some of you are probably aware that kids can take FOR FUCKING EVER to eat a tiny portion of food). It can be frustrating, but I've got the oldest group of kids in the school, so at least I don't have to feed any of them by hand. After lunch the kids settle down for a two-hour nap that I envy intensely. I spend the two hours getting some food myself and chatting up the other teachers. I also do all my preparation for the afternoon block of classes, which is usually when we do our artwork. 

After naptime is Music and Movement, which I loathe with a fiery passion. For my class, Music and Movement typically involves 15 minutes spent learning 1 new song each week (The Ants Go Marching; I Knew An Old Woman; You Are My Sunshine; etc.), and then 15 minutes of musical chairs to wake them up a bit. The hardest part for me is finding a new kid-appropriate song each week that is easy enough for them to learn but still interesting enough for me to want to teach them.

After everyone is (in theory) awake and alert, we have an hour of class time (reading, writing, phonics, whatever), followed by another snack, and then another 15 minute break. Our last class of the day is typically an art class where we make some thematic art piece and write a couple of sentences about it just to stay on top of our linguistic learning modality. This month is Halloween, which bores the crap out of me, but at least we make pretty things.

The last 20 minutes of the day are story time, where I read a story to the kids, which can be hell if they are restless, and heaven if they are attentive.

Fun things: Tuesday and Thursday we have Park Time for the first hour-long block of the day. On dry days we take the kids to the nearby DaAn forest park, which is huge, wooded, and beautiful. The kids run around and have unrestricted playtime, and it's a joy to watch, and now I know why my brother Chris was a day camp counselor for so long. I'm considering it myself, now that I see how awesome it is. An unrelated fun thing is putting on my mix CD while the kids do artwork: wordless trip-hop and inoffensive rock like The Beatles and The Red Hot Chili Peppers makes art class infinitely more fun. One final fun thing: getting the kids to memorize new songs a cappella is great: singing without music is really fun.

THE DIRT!

Okay, so the two main "dirt" categories are the teaching curriculum and the management.

The curriculum: simply put, I'm teaching 1st grade materials at American school speeds to a bunch of kindergarteners who work at an ESL level. A lot of the work is not only difficult and challenging, but rather straightforwardly over their heads. I do my best to make it accessible, but some days it's clear that the kids are bored because they simply have no idea what's going on. This can, however, lead to hilarious answers to questions. I asked one kid, "What's the opposite of 'happy'"? He replies, "House!" I have no idea why, but he was really excited to have discovered that house and happy are diametrically opposed.

The management: my manager is the least competent person I have ever encountered. She leaves kids alone in rooms while they are eating. She spoon feeds children mouthfuls of food that simply will not fit inside their mouths. She hires Chinese-speaking TAs who conveniently do not speak English. She fires Chinese-speaking TAs who speak fantastic English because they embarrass her by doing her job better than she does. She is terrified of parents (her job is to liaise with the parents and recruit new students). Finally, she is somewhat dumb. It's become clear that it's not just that she's often flustered by being both in over her head and unable to admit it. Two questions she has asked this week: "How do these crayons work?" (They had lids.) "How many legs does a spider have? Eight? Nine? I just don't know!" (8, for those keeping track at home.) She has trouble with child-locked cabinets.

I realize this is a long paragraph of negativity. I want to stress that when I arrived, I found my boss to be innocuously likable: kind of a non-personality that seemed pleasant enough. After 6 weeks of teaching, I know more about children than she does (no, really, I do!), and she has two kids at home. She endangers the kids, she makes terrible decisions that make my job harder, and she flatters everyone incessantly without ever providing constructive criticism (and I know I need it, because I'm still terribly unfamiliar with my job, even after 6 weeks).

So that's the gist of why my job is tragically hilarious. That, and the fact that I don't have any support from a TA (my TA is really, really competent, but that means she has to fill in for the manager whenever the manager runs into something she can't handle). So I'm alone in a room with 8 kids who have varying grasps of English and who aren't allowed to speak Chinese at all at school. Ah well. At least it's all really quite funny!

And I do love the kids. The decision point for me will come when my manager makes my job so difficult that I can no longer enjoy the time I get with my students. As long as I'm enjoying my classroom time, I'll stay. It does make it worthwhile. That's what I've come to realize.

I went up on the roof a few minutes ago to check things out. We've got about an inch and a half of water, but the drainage seems to be doing all right. It's gusty up there, and there's lots of rain coming down. Visibility is maybe 1 km, at the most (on a clear day it's around 15 km I'd guess). It's pretty epic up there. 

Standing on the roof of an apartment building in the middle of a typhoon is pretty invigorating, really.

Incoming!

Big ol' typhoon comin' in, late in the season. Set to maybe actually rough up our fair city a bit, unlike the last one came through.

If'n y'all don't hear from me for a few days, it's likely due to internet failures, rather than life failures. As Katherine said, "ain't no storm gonna keel haul me!" It takes more than a hurricane to get my dander up.

So far away

I don't miss places as much as people, I'm finding. Except that I really miss Hawaii. I got some photos in an email today from a professional photographer who was hanging out where we went cliff jumping. He had an underwater camera, and got some awesome pictures.

Also, my family email list has been buzzing with news about my Grandmother's 80th birthday, and one of my uncles sent along this gem: "Are we sure she's 80? It seems like Gillie [my great aunt, as I recall] tried to pull this one on us once. She doesn't look like she's 80. We should get the ping pong table going too." I miss my family!

Testing!

Here are some pictures of me with the little rugrats!

Steppin along

I used the last of my putative food money for the month on new running shoes yesterday. My exercise regimen had essentially disintegrated, and I was feeling crappy physically and emotionally, so I went and spent money. What a good little consumer!

I went for a run through DaAn park tonight, though, and realized that even though I am pretty out of shape (could only go for 15 minutes before I had to walk a bit), it won't take too long to get it back, if I'm consistent. Plus, the park is really pretty, and there are tons of people doing Tai Chi and Qi Gong, which are both lovely to run past. Very cinematic.

Work kinda sucks, to be honest. I've already come to the conclusion that unless something changes at work I'll be leaving in February, either to teach middle schoolers in the afternoon, or to quit teaching entirely in favor of traveling and living off whatever I can save between now and then. The thing is, though, I don't even know if I can make it to February. I'm going to try my best, though.

I really like Taipei. It's an amazing city full of interesting people and beautiful sights. I wish I had a marketable skill here besides my English abilities. I'd love to live here working in some other capacity.